Years ago, before men came to know about God the way they assumedly know him today, they had their cultural-traditional belief systems that were strictly ritualistic and moralistic. In the African tradition religions, there were bad and good spirits that people worshiped. When the missionaries came with the Western worldview of gods and the Eastern worldview of Islam, they discouraged the cultural traditional beliefs and replaced them with what today is known as mainstream Religion, i.e. Catholicism, Orthodox, Islam, SDA, Anglican, etc.
These religions taught nothing but traditions of other men in the name of God. When Catholicism found the African Tradition Religion with objects of worship like stones, hills, trees, beads etc., it simply substituted them with images of the so-called blessed Virgin Mary, baby Jesus, and the Cross. And so did Islam.
So basically, idol worship was not changed but it is the idols (objects of worship) that were switched. It was this problem that led to the emergence of reformers like Martin Luther King and others who opposed this mixture of truth and error and re-ignited Biblical Christianity in the form of Protestantism.
The Protestantism of the Martin Luthers and the Ulrich Zwinglis was focused on redirecting people back to the book (Bible) and calling the attention of all the people to what the text said. However, as time went by, this movement too, was compromised into religion. Today, Protestantism as an umbrella prides in thousands of belief systems, sects, and religions. One of the many belief systems that have emerged from Protestantism is PENTECOSTALISM. Let us trace the history of this movement.
According to Vinson H. Synan, in the book: The Holiness-Pentecostal Movement in the United States.
“The Pentecostal Movement grew out of the Holiness Revival of the second half of the nineteenth century. This revival was an expression of both social and theological discontent among the nation’s lower and middle-class groups. Holiness followers disapproved of the godlessness in mainline denominations, as well as the growing wealth and lack of simplicity of their churches. Not content to remain in mainline churches, they formed new religious communities committed to seeking perfection in Christ.
These former Methodists, Presbyterians, and Baptists were experiencing a renewed outpouring of the Holy Spirit much like the early church experienced in the book of Acts. The Holiness Revival produced a hunger for the Baptism of the Holy Spirit (a divine empowerment of believers) and for other spiritual gifts promised to the New Testament church such as healing and prophecy”.
Their key verses on which their new Theology rested were: “And it shall come to pass afterward, that I will pour out my spirit upon all flesh; and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, your young men shall see visions: And also upon the servants and upon the handmaids in those days will I pour out my spirit” (Joel 2:28-29).
And the second one said: “And when the day of Pentecost was fully come, they were all with one accord in one place. And suddenly there came a sound from heaven as of a rushing mighty wind, and it filled all the house where they were sitting. And there appeared unto them cloven tongues like as of fire, and it sat upon each of them. And they were all filled with the Holy Ghost, and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance” (Acts 2:1-4).
Whether these texts were used in context or not, that will be for another day.
Margaret M. Poloma, in her book: The Pentecostal Movement, says:
In the nineteenth century, Edward Irving, a popular Presbyterian pastor in London, sought after the restoration of the spiritual gifts or charisms in the modern church. Irving led the first attempt at “charismatic/spiritual renewal” in his Regents Square Presbyterian Church in 1831. Although the gifts of tongues and prophecies were operated in his church, Irving was not successful in his quest of restoring New Testament Christianity.
In the end, the “Catholic Apostolic Church” which was founded by his followers, attempted to restore the “five-fold ministries” (of apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors, and teachers) in addition to the spiritual gifts. Irving pointed to speaking in tongues as the first manifestation of the baptism in/receiving the Holy Spirit, a major facet in the future of the Pentecostals.
In the United States, holiness leaders such as Charles Cullis, John Alexander Dowie, and Albert B. Simpson established healing missions across the states. They, like other holiness advocates, believed a new, miraculous era of the Spirit was occurring which would end in the second coming of Christ”.
Now we all know why it was the Pentecostals who launched the overnight services on the 31st December of every year.
Albert B. Simpson says that:
Another predecessor to Pentecostalism was the Keswick “Higher Life” movement which flourished in England after 1875. Led at first by American holiness teachers such as Hannah Whitall Smith and William E. Boardman, the Keswick teachers put an emphasis on an “enduement of spiritual power for service.” Thus, by the time of the Pentecostal outbreak in America in 1901, there had been at least a century of movements emphasizing an experience called the “baptism in the Holy Spirit” with various interpretations concerning the content and results of the experience.
In America, such Keswick teachers as A.B. Simpson and A.J. Gordon also added to the movement at large an emphasis on divine healing “as in the atonement” and the pre-millennial rapture of the church. This was for the 18th to 19th-century original inceptions of this movement. As for the 20th century Pentecostalism J. Roswell Flower, the founding Secretary of the Assemblies of God says: The first “Pentecostals” in the modern sense appeared on the scene in 1901 in the city of Topeka, Kansas in a Bible school conducted by Charles Fox Parham, a holiness teacher, and former Methodist pastor.
In January 1901, Parham asked the students at the Bible school to study the Bible to find out the scriptural evidence for receiving the baptism of the Holy Spirit. Using the Pentecost account in Acts chapter two, they concluded that speaking in tongues was the confirmation of receiving the Holy Spirit. Thus, the Pentecostal movement began during the first days of 1901 just as the world entered the Twentieth Century.
The first person to receive the infilling of the Holy Spirit was Agnes Ozman, one of Parham’s Bible School students – she spoke in tongues on the very first day of the new century, January 1st, 1901. According to J. Roswell Flower, the founding Secretary of the Assemblies of God, Ozman’s experience was the “touch felt round the world,” an event which “made the Pentecostal Movement of the Twentieth Century.”
It was not until 1906, however, that Pentecostalism achieved worldwide attention through the Azusa Street revival in Los Angeles led by the African-American preacher William Joseph Seymour. He learned about the baptism of the Holy Spirit in a Bible school that Parham conducted in Houston, Texas in 1905. Invited to pastor a black holiness church in Los Angeles in 1906, Seymour opened the historic meeting in April, 1906 in a former African Methodist Episcopal church building at 312 Azusa Street in downtown Los Angeles.
Ever since then, the Pentecostal movement is by far the largest and most dominant religious movement of the twentieth century. Beginning in 1901 with only a handful of students in a Bible School in Topeka, Kansas, the number of Pentecostals steadily increased throughout the world during the Twentieth Century until by 1993 they had become the largest family of Protestants in the world. In 2000, there were an estimated 560 million Pentecostals in the world. (Much of this is shared from the Christian Assemblies International website)
Since its inception in the 18th century, Pentecostalism has been evolving and its evolvement is historically categorized under three waves.
The early wave of Pentecostalism is known as the Classic Pentecostalism (Old Pentecostalism or popularly known as the Assemblies of God). This wave ranges from the 2nd century with early heretics like self-proclaimed prophet Montanus. Who was a heretic who spoke in tongues and was speaking some kind of emotional, nonsense gibberish and not real languages as was the case in Acts chapter 2. It is this stream that goes up to Edward Irving of the 19th Century.
The Second wave of Pentecostalism was known as the Charismatic Renewal (New Pentecostalism). This wave is from the 1960s to the 1980s. This brings us to the third wave. The first wave of the moving of the Holy Spirit began at the beginning of the century with the Pentecostal movement. The second wave was the charismatic movement which began in the fifties in the major denominations.
Peter C. Wagner in his book Pastoral Renewal wrote:
“I see the third wave of the eighties as an opening of the straight-line evangelicals and other Christians to the supernatural work of the Holy Spirit that the Pentecostals and charismatics have experienced, but without becoming either charismatic or Pentecostal. I think we are in a new wave of something that now has lasted almost through our whole century”.
And this is the third wave known as the Signs and Wonders Movement (Consumer Pentecostalism). Pentecostalism as a social institution has been changing its organizational form, redefining its mission, and creating new expressions of worship. Since then there has been a vast change in denominations, where some decline and revival has been witnessed through the years. Since I believe that we are now in the wave of Signs and Wonders I will concentrate on that in this presentation.
It is true that every belief system is both substantially and characteristically based on two pillars:
- A: Identity (Who they are).
- B: Morality (How they be).
Every pillar, however, has its principle defining element. For instance, indigenous mainstream religions like Islam, Catholicism, Orthodox, Anglican etc. have:
- As the motif of their identity
- As the standard of their morality.
While the indigenous religions have Ritual as their identity and Law as the standard of their morality, Signs and Wonders Pentecostalism has:
- Consumerism: as their identity
- Liberty: as the standard of their Morality.
Now, this sounds like am making a conclusion that modern-day Pentecostalism is a CONSUMER RELIGION. YES IT IS. I have to clear the air, however, that this does not intend individual believers or even specific born again congregations but I mean the umbrella known as Pentecostalism. And specifically, the Signs and Wonders Movement. The Signs and Wonders movement stresses “power evangelism” and it is propagated on radio and television broadcasts whereby the gospel is explained and demonstrated by way of supernatural signs and wonders.
In the Signs and Wonders movement, speaking in tongues can be found, but the gift of tongues is not stressed as much as it is in the Pentecostal and Charismatic movements. The Signs and Wonders movement does stress the gift of prophecy (insisting on the importance of modern day prophets) and the gift of healing.
The Theology of this wave is fundamentally the Prosperity Gospel whose content is threefold:
- The philosophy of speak good and think positive,
- Health and
- Wealth
Research shows that: the ministries of three televangelists commonly viewed as founders of the prosperity gospel movement – Kenneth Hagin, Kenneth Copeland, and Frederick K.C. Price – took hold in the 1970s and 1980s. One of the former and best-known proponents of prosperity theology is Oral Roberts – the television faith healer in the 1980s.
However, before these Word of Faith telecast evangelist healers took the stage, there were other historical prosperity and Signs and Wonders teachers in history from whom these modern evangelists drunk their wine.
According to Russell Woodbridge:
“The prosperity gospel is built on a quasi-Christian heresy, popular in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in the United States, known as New Thought. This philosophy teaches that the key to health and wealth acquisition is thinking, visualizing, and speaking the right words.
Norman Vincent Peale (1898–1993), pastor of Marble Collegiate Church in New York City, popularized New Thought ideas and techniques in America through his book The Power of Positive Thinking (1952). Ralph Waldo Trine (1866–1958), however, was the most prolific purveyor of New Thought.
In both works, one can discern some of the key recurring elements of the prosperity gospel: speaking the right words, invoking a universal law of success with words, and having faith in oneself. The ideas of New Thought influenced, among others, E. W. Kenyon (1867–1948), an evangelist, pastor, and founder of Bethel Bible Institute.
His approach to theology is the basis for one of the prosperity gospel’s most distinctive features—speaking the right words to bring about a new reality; what you confess, you possess. Kenyon served as a link to the popular prosperity preachers that formed the foundation of the modern prosperity gospel movement”.
As you can see the Prosperity Gospel was born in the United States and it is no surprise to me because, after all, the culture of Americans is Consumerism. The underlying principle of the American Culture is: WHO GETS WHAT. That is why their motivation philosophy is: THE AMERICAN DREAM and this is what they have sown in the United States and globally.
Victor Lebow defined the American consumer religion best when he said: “Our enormously productive economy demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfaction and our ego satisfaction in consumption. We need things consumed, burned up, worn out, replaced and discarded at an ever-increasing rate”. Victor Lebow, Journal of Retailing (1955).
The American consumer culture is dominant in the Commonwealth countries, after all, America itself was a colony of the United Kingdom. It is no wonder then that the biggest Pentecostal countries in Africa according to recent statistics are: Zimbabwe, South Africa, Ghana, Congo-Zaire, Nigeria, Kenya, Angola, Zambia, and Uganda. When you closely look at the governing cultures of these countries it will not take you long to recognize that; first, they have a painful history and secondly, they are consumer societies. Let me use a case study of Uganda.
Uganda is a nation that has a history of wars and whose political capital is determined by the Buganda region in which 90% of Uganda’s Pentecostalism is. Whoever has done anthropological studies like myself will agree with me that the basal culture of Baganda is consumerism. No wonder they are the key proponents of this prosperity and miracle churches. I hope now you see how Pentecostalism spreads and manages to attract masses. The population of Pentecostalism is comprised of the gullible, paranoid, poor and the greedy opportunists running after easy fortunes.
People nowadays go to church to seek spiritual satisfaction, not from their relationship with God, but from what they can get from God. Pentecostalism worships a god who fertilizes people’s egos and the worshippers are repellant to the God who keeps their greed in check.
Someone said:
“The gospel of prosperity turns Christianity into a vapid bless-me club, with a doctrine that amounts to little more than spiritual magical thinking: If you pray the right way, God will make you rich”.
Pentecostalism hypnotizes the gullible populace with its overstressed emphasis on demonic forces or “spiritual attacks” (every problem in an ordinary Pentecostal church is either a demon or a spiritual attack) as the justification for the followers’ misfortunes, physically and spiritually. Since the gap between the rich and poor is wide and it is easier to get rich than it is to be poor, these prosperity preachers capitalize on the paranoid psyche of the poor and gluttonous greed of the middle class.
Modern men of God are more popular than the Jesus they preach. An average Pentecostal church does not have permanent membership, but they have mobile believers who are swayed, from time to time, to specific churches that promise to address their specific materialistic needs. Believers categorize and characterize pastors and assign specific anointing. Pastor so and so heals, Apostle so and so casts out demons, Prophet so and so foretells and blesses economically.
Believers keep running from church to church as someone in the marketplace does their errands. One wonders whether God is fully in a church or he is spread out in bits and pieces in each church they run to! This is consumerism. It is a belief in miracles at the expense of the Lord of all miracles.
Am not opposed to miracles, I believe in miracles trust me. However, I also know that once you pray for a miracle, once it happens it ceases to be a miracle and becomes an answered prayer request.
Ladies and gentlemen, as a Pastor and a Theologian, allow me to inform you that miracles have never been part of the economy of God. The way of heaven is not magical but procedural. You and I should not assume miracles where we have neglected responsibility. Before Sin, man was placed in a perfect garden but still, he was instructed to cultivate it – Genesis 2:15.
There were many miracles, signs, and wonders that Jesus performed but were not recorded in the Bible (John 20:30). The miracles that were recorded in the New Testament that Jesus performed are 35 in number. What we can learn from the recorded miracles, signs and wonders is that they served two purposes:
- The Primary purpose of the Biblical miracles was to authenticate who Jesus was and his intentions towards his Creation. Jesus performed philanthropic miracles as a counter argument against the argument of evil in the world as his will. The underlying agenda of all his miracles and acts was coined in these words: The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly. (John 10:10 RSV). It was always about Jesus Christ, not any other person.
- The second purpose of miracles was to rubber-stamp and authenticate the Gospel of Jesus where it was contested. Mark says that the Lord “confirmed his word [that the apostles preached] by the signs that accompanied it? (Mark 16:20). When Luke was describing the ministry of Paul and Barnabas at Iconium, he said that the Lord “confirmed the message of his grace by enabling them to do miraculous signs and wonders? (Acts 14:3). Notice that in both of these texts, the Lord does not confirm the apostles themselves but rather “his word” or “the Gospel” that the apostles were preaching. Signs and wonders do not testify to the apostles but to the message of salvation preached by the apostles. The problem with modern Pentecostalism is that; miracles testify to the so-called men of God than God himself.
Now I don’t care whether you go to Mega Fest conferences for miracles, or 77 Days of Glory or attend the P5, it doesn’t matter whether you buy a brick as a point of contact to wealth, or you buy a kilogram of Holy rice, I don’t care how many times you religiously do pilgrims to Israel as the Holy Land. Whether you carry holy water and scarfs, head covers, shawls and handkerchiefs from Israel, or from your pastor. It doesn’t matter how much you seed to harvest, whether you go to prophet so and so, wherever you go…I don’t care whether you touch the TV or radio. It doesn’t matter whether it works for you.
What I want you to know is that God does not want us to eat bread from earthly bakeries. He wants us to eat him because he is the bread of life. He says to all of us that: “I tell you the truth, you are looking for me, not because you saw miraculous signs but because you ate the loaves and had your fill”. Modern believers are following Jesus not because of who he is but because of what he has. But Jesus warns them in John 6:27 that: “Do not work for food that spoils, but for food that endures to eternal life, which the Son of Man will give you. On him God the Father has placed his seal of approval.”
God knows that everything materialistic you follow him for will eventually get spoilt. When I see people in church reducing God to a car, healing, house, airplane flight, I think of people who have all that is on your prayer request but do not believe God. We must rescue our souls from this consumer religion. A religion that knows and wants only what Jesus has and can give but not him.
The Bible says in Mathew 7:21-23 that: “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only he who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. Many will say to me on that day, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and in your name drive out demons and perform many miracles?’ Then I will tell them plainly, ‘I never knew you. Away from me, you evildoers!’. I can’t say more, but we all must not use God to our end, we must let him use us instead.
God bless you, I invoke TRUTH, REASON and FAITH
Am Pr. I.T.WHITE
The Gospel Hawker
iTiS Well of Worship Fellowship (John 4:24) 